Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [345]
“Mike Romanoff,” remembered Susie Tracy, “was the one who told my father that Fleming had died. He came over to the table and very quietly said, ‘Did you know about …’ My dad was utterly stunned. He really couldn’t say anything for a couple of minutes. Finally he said, ‘Go ahead with your meal, but you’ll have to excuse me. I can’t stay.’ And it was clear that he was very upset about it.” Tracy attended the Fleming services on January 10, 1949, at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, as did Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, L. B. Mayer, Van Johnson, Ingrid Bergman, and a number of others.
With the deaths of Dick Mook, Father Flanagan, and now Fleming coming within such a short span of time, Tracy found himself drawn closer to Gable, who was, as they both approached fifty, a touchstone to earlier and happier times. Schary’s arrival had given the studio an atmosphere of uncertainty, for Mayer, Mannix, and Thau were no longer the triumvirate in charge of production, and all the producers on the lot had, for the first time since the heyday of Irving Thalberg, been consolidated under one man. Gable had come onto the set of State of the Union to be photographed with his old friend and costar, the two men grayer and heavier than they had been only a few years earlier but letting fly with the same good-natured insults. Not long after the Fleming funeral, at which Gable was a pallbearer, Tracy returned the favor by walking onto the set of Any Number Can Play.
“He and Gable went into Gable’s dressing room,” Darryl Hickman remembered, “and they laughed—I never heard two men carry on like Gable and Tracy carried on. They had a great relationship. They laughed and told old stories, and everything just shut down for about an hour while Gable and Tracy sat in that dressing room, and it shook with them having a ball. It was just a delight to sit there and listen to them do it.”
Soon after, Gable ambled onto the stage where Operation Malaya was shooting, planted himself in a comfortable chair, and greeted the unlikely sight of Tracy, in white linen suit and Panama hat, gingerly making his way through a stand of jungle growth with a tremendous peal of laughter. “That’s all right,” shouted Tracy. “This time, I get the girl.” Gable returned: “That’s just because I’m not in the picture!” Later, when Tracy wandered onto the set of Gable’s next film, the King showed him a framed clipping from a Shanghai newspaper naming Parnell the best picture of the year. “Looky here Spence,” he said, “and admit defeat.” Underneath the yellowing review were scrawled the words “50 million Chinese can’t be wrong.” Tracy scornfully studied the display, then handed it back. “Well, King, now I know where you belong … in China.”
With Clark Gable during the filming of Gable’s picture Homecoming, 1947. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Collegial and sweet-tempered, Dore Schary was sincere in his desire to raise the tone and profitability of the M-G-M program, taking personal responsibility for an announced slate of sixty-seven features for the 1949–50 season. Heading the list, Operation Malaya had the advantage of a short schedule and, given its cast and pretensions, the relatively modest budget of $1.3 million. Tracy took the role of Carny Carnahan, submitting to a prison buzz cut that had the effect of aging him ten years. Jimmy Stewart, playing the newsman, would share the screen with Tracy for the first time since The Murder Man, when he was, as he once remarked, “all hands and feet and didn’t seem to know what to do with either.” Sydney Greenstreet, John Hodiak, Lionel Barrymore, Gilbert Roland, and Valentina Cortese, borrowed from Fox, rounded out the principal cast.
A genuine potboiler, turgid and obvious, Operation Malaya was difficult to take seriously, and Tracy and Stewart played their parts as if they were making a “Road” picture rather than an exotic adventure yarn. “This normally